During this month of December, many minds and hearts will turn to their ideas of Jesus. Yet search as we may we do not find a single valid reference to Jesus in the contemnor records of his time. Did he really exist? If so, what can we say of him? And why are there so few records of his existence? What did he "come here" for? Was he a son of God? Theosophy has answers to these questions, and more, about Jesus. I will be offering quotes from HPB to shed some light on these puzzles.
JESUS OF THE SYNOTPIC GOSPELS
Blavatsky says the personality of Jesus "was distorted out of recognition" by the Biblical version. (SDii231)
Again she says:
"Under this unexpected garb his personality was all but lost. In the modern Jesus of the Christian Church, we find the ideal of the imaginative Irenaeus, not the adept of the Essenes, the obscure reformer from Galilee. We see him under the disfigured Plato-Philonean mask, not as the disciples heard him on the mount." (IUii33-4)
But then she gives her explanation of the common story in the synoptic gospels:
"... his story, as told in the New Testament, is an allegory, assuredly containing profound esoteric truths, but still an allegory. . . . Every act of the Jesus of the New Testament, every word attributed to him, every event related of him during the three years of the mission he is said to have accomplished, rests on the programme of the Cycle of Initiation, a cycle founded on the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Signs of the Zodiac." (BCW 9:225)
THE HISTORICAL JESUS
In numerous other places Blavatsky makes statements that very definitely imply the reality of a very specific individual. In this next somewhat long, but very informative, quote she places the real Jesus within the structure of other existing groups of the time.
"The oldest Nazarenes, who were the descendants of the Scripture nazars, and whose last prominent leader was John the Baptist, although never very orthodox in the sight of the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem were, nevertheless, respected and left unmolested. Even Herod “feared the multitude” because they regarded John as a prophet (Matthew xiv. 5). But the followers of Jesus evidently adhered to a sect which became a still more exasperating thorn in their side. It appeared as a heresy within another heresy; for while the nazars of the olden times, the “Sons of the Prophets,” were Chaldean kabalists, the adepts of the new dissenting sect showed themselves reformers and innovators from the first. The great similitude traced by some critics between the rites and observances of the earliest Christians and those of the Essenes may be accounted for without the slightest difficulty. The Essenes, as we remarked just now, were the converts of Buddhist missionaries who had overrun Egypt, Greece, and even Judea at one time, since the reign of Asoka the zealous propagandist; and while it is evidently to the Essenes that belongs the honor of having had the Nazarene reformer, Jesus, as a pupil, still the latter is found disagreeing with his early teachers on several questions of formal observance. He cannot strictly be called an Essene, for reasons which we will indicate further on, neither was he a nazar, or Nazaria of the older sect. What Jesus was, may be found in the Codex Nazaraeus, in the unjust accusations of the Bardesanian Gnostics.
